Tech Giants Team to Standardize Web Services

It's long been promised that Web services would help form a quilt from the patchwork of IT industry products, sewing together software from partners and foes alike with the thread provided by common standards. But it turns out that software vendors may not all be using the same color thread.

A broad consortium of industry players including Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and BEA Systems have formed a consortium whose main goal is to ensure that vendors developing products for Web services implement the most commonly used standards in the same way. The consortium, called the Web Services Interoperability Organization, was announced Wednesday afternoon.

Other founding members include Oracle, Accenture, Fujitsu, Intel, and Germany's SAP, according to a statement issued by the group.

The list of standards is familiar to many in the industry. It includes Extensible Markup Language, Simple Object Access Protocol, Web Services Description Language, and Universal Description Discovery and Integration. But while the industry has rallied around the standards, few have taken steps to ensure their products will interoperate.

Broad Standards

"You'd be surprised how little interoperability there really is despite standards," says Mike Gilpin, a research fellow with Giga Information Group, adding that many companies support common standards but use them in proprietary ways. "The specifications of these standards are so broad that depending on what you want to do you with them, you could end up with a different result.

"Two different companies can build a Web service, each one following the same specification yet using different options, and those services would not be able to talk to each other," Gilpin adds.

Web services has been touted as a way to allow applications of different types and from different vendors to communicate with each other in a common way over the Internet. In the business world, for example, Web services could allow a company to automatically share data, such as inventory levels, with partners in its supply chain.

To overcome the problem of implementing standards in different ways, the group plans to create a variety of test suites that will allow vendors and customers to make sure their software interoperates. An operating systems vendor, for example, would be able to ensure its products interoperate with business applications from a different vendor. Tests will be self-administered and are intended to help uncover "unconventional usage or errors in specification implementations," the group says.

Offering Guidelines

The group will also offer guidance to customers who want to use Web services, and try to articulate a "common industry vision" of what Web services are, according to the statement.

The problem, according to Rod Smith, vice president of Internet emerging technology at IBM, is that as various software vendors raced to keep up with the latest standards, each vendor ended up creating its own, slightly different implementation. This was due in part to the eagerness of customers to get their hands on Web services products, according to Smith.

"Customers didn't want to wait for the standards to be done, but they expected all of us to upgrade our systems," Smith says. "It's not like the old world where customers said 'let's wait until it's all ripe and done.'"

The group hopes to lead the industry toward using standards in a common way, and to ensure that future standards dealing with issues such as security and authentication are interoperable.

"The Web services industry is still at a very early stage," says Bob Bickel, general manager of middleware at HP. "There's a coming set of issues around transactions and security, for instance, that are all still in the emerging stage. This forum adds some weight to make sure there aren't too many divergent views as new standards emerge."

Missing in Action

Absent from the group was Sun Microsystems, creator of the Java programming language and one of the most prominent companies developing new tools and software for Web services. Sun executives were not available to comment on whether Sun plans to join the effort in the future, a company spokesperson says.

Not every company will need to join the consortium to take advantage of the group's work, notes Giga's Gilpin. What is important is for the industry to agree on a way to develop software and tools for Web services that will interoperate, officials say.

"Interoperability is crucial to our success, and really the industry's success with fulfilling the Web services vision," says Neil Charney, director of the .Net platform strategy group at Microsoft. "Everyone has a vested interest in ensuring that Web services are going to move forward in a clearly defined way."